The early years following the Civilization Fund Act marked a broad rise in the creation of mission schools. From relatively few schools founded in the late 1810s (most significantly the ABCFM’s Brainerd Mission 1816 and Elliot Mission, 1818), older holdovers (the Moravian Springplace Mission, 1801 and the UFMS Tuscarora Mission, 1811), and itinerant and exploratory work among frontier tribes (e.g. the travels of the Baptist Isaac McCoy in the West), the years following 1819 saw the beginnings of a much broader array of Indian missionary activity that mostly focused on schooling.
The Methodist Episcopal Church, for example, formed a missionary society in 1819 and commenced mission work at Upper Sandusky among the Wyandots that same year. The Baptists founded Great Crossings (Choctaw Academy), the Valley Towns Mission, a mission in Fort Wayne, the Carey Mission in Michigan, among others, all in quick succession. The United Foreign Missionary Society formed its Osage missions, first at Union (1820) and then at Harmony (1821), while the Cumberland Presbyterians commenced work with the Chickasaws at Charity Hall (1820).
The American Board expanded its Cherokee and Choctaw work, including the formation of the Dwight Mission (1820) for emigre Cherokees in Arkansas and the extension of the eastern Cherokee schools (e.g. Carmel/Taloney, 1819, Creekpath, 1820, and Willstown, 1823). The first Choctaw mission at Elliot quickly turned into a much larger system with Choctaw support, including the large Mayhew (1820) and a series of smaller local schools (mostly 1822 and 1823).
By 1824, new groups joined the enterprise: the Jesuits at Florissant, Missouri, the Massachusetts-based SPGNA working with the Passamaquoddies in Maine, and the Episcopalians at Oneida Castle. Perhaps it is unsurprising that these groups, all of which had important connections to much older missionary efforts (the SPGNA stood in continuity with the Puritan tradition of missions, for example), were relatively slow to secure federal funding.
As discussed in Limitations, Figure A is not a comprehensive depiction of these missionary efforts, but rather portrays snapshots of each mission from the federal reports that were submitted as part of the Civilization Fund program. Not infrequently, mission superintendents neglected to send reports to Washington. This should not be taken as an indication that they did not exist during these years, that they were struggling, or that they did not receive federal funding. None of these are necessarily the case.
The banner year in the 1820s appears to be 1825, when a flourishing archipelago of federally funded mission schools stretched from the Anishinaabe tribes of the Midwest to the Passamaquoddies of Maine, to the southeastern Cherokees, Choctaws of Mississippi, and the Osages on the edge of the Great Plains. Thirty-seven different missions were funded that year, representing eleven different groups of various denominations: Reformed (mostly Presbyterian and Congregational but also Dutch Reformed), Baptist, Methodist, Cumberland Presbyterian, Episcopal, Moravian, and Catholic (Jesuit). Figure C reflects the dramatic increase in incomes, expenditures, and property values during this period.
That winter into early 1826, a major panic took hold on American and international markets. We hypothesized that this crash might have led to a major reorientation of mission funding starting in 1826. Instead, our data does not show major changes associated with the Panic. Perhaps financial concerns could have been a factor in driving increased organizational interest in the fund and increasing easterners’ willingness to serve in a mission, but the Panic does not register as a major moment in the reports, which generally show steady building expenditures and slowly expanding staff numbers.
There were some important shifts, especially of consolidation towards the American Board. The United Foreign Missionary Society, which had sponsored important missions to the Osages, at Mackinac Island, to the Haudenasaunee in upstate New York, and elsewhere, was shuttered that year, wracked by financial problems, handing its missions off to the ABCFM. These included some, like those at Buffalo Creek/Seneca Mission (1819) and Maumee (1822) that had originally been formed by local missionary societies (respectively, the New York Missionary Society and the Western Missionary Society of Pittsburhg). In 1827, the Presbyterian Synod of South Carolina and Georgia also handed its Chickasaw schools at Monroe (1821), Tockshish (1823), and Martyn (1825) to the ABCFM.
Across the 1820s, the ratio of students to submitted reports remains relatively consistent, indicating that the missions that did exist, taken together, maintained relatively stable student numbers (See Figure B below) This suggests that the missions opened new schools when numbers dictated it and closed them for the same reason.
The number of reports declines towards the end of the 1820s (see Figure J). However, because the reports are not a full picture of the Indian mission system, this should not be taken by itself as an indication that the late 1820s witnessed a massive wave of school closures.
That said, the threat of removal loomed over the missions, especially following Andrew Jackson’s election in 1828 and his adoption of a policy of expelling eastern tribes beyond the Mississippi, which was formalized in the Indian Removal Act of 1830.
As early as 1819, the Baptists, who had established schools among the Cherokees in the Tennessee-North Carolina borderlands, decided to temporarily close them on the basis that the tribe may soon be departing westward.
Missions began to close in the late 1820s, although the major upheaval took place in the 1830s. Many of the smaller Choctaw schools existed only briefly. In Connecticut, the experimental Foreign Mission School at Cornwall was concluded in 1826 following a scandalous interracial marriage, leading ultimately to the mission’s closure in the early 1830s. The Baptists’ Carey Mission in Michigan was seriously weakened following the Treaty of St. Joseph (1827), in which the Potawatomi ceded much of their lands in southern Michigan.